Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Slow day today on the update front, but the emails did (finally) get out. Here's what happened.

The nightly poll collided at just after 2AM with an on-demand mailing and could not access the SMTP server. As a result it just stopped. The application was rebalanced to avoid this happening in future and restarted.

A feed added between 2AM and 9AM or so is causing FeedBlitz performance problems, something which hasn't happened since mid-November. The effect is that part of the nightly poll was consuming nearly all the CPU cycles on the server, causing the delivery of mails to slow down considerably as the other threads in the system compensated. This problem is being researched in order to determine the most appropriate remedy.

Bottom line - the emails have gone out, albeit 12+ hours later than everyone's used to - we apologize for the delay.